Some embodiments described herein relate generally to distributed switch fabric systems, and, in particular, to automatically provisioning resources and transmitting forwarding-state information in a distributed switch fabric system.
Some known networking systems use a targeted routing protocol to distribute forwarding-state information between different nodes within the networking system. Such known networking systems, however, do not automatically provision the nodes of the network system. Similarly stated, such known networking systems do not automatically provide identifiers and/or addresses of each node to the other nodes within the networking system. Accordingly, to transmit forwarding-state information between the nodes within the networking system, a system administrator manually configures each node within the networking system with the addresses and/or identifiers of the remaining nodes within the networking system.
In networking systems having a large number of nodes and/or in networking systems in which the topology frequently changes, manually configuring each node within the system can be time and/or labor intensive. Additionally, errors can be accidentally input into a configuration file by the system administrator during manual configuration.
Accordingly, a need exists for apparatus and methods to automatically provision a switch fabric system such that the nodes within the switch fabric system can exchange forwarding-state information using a targeted protocol.